Previously available with English subtitles only as an import double feature VCD from Thailand, Geneon Entertainment releases Shibuya Kaiden, or The Locker and its follow up film, The Locker II one a decent quality double feature DVD in North America for the first time. These films have apparently proven to be quite popular in their native Japan, where they were both released to the V-Cinema (read: straight to video) market to some notable success. The appeal, however, was lost on this reviewer as these prove to be copycat films in many respects, literally ripping off scenes from other, better Japanese horror films of recent time (cough cough Ring cough cough).

The Locker: A group of Japanese teenagers head off to a summer camp and hit it off fairly well. As friendships blossom, and the characters get to know one another, strange and unusual things begin happening to them once they arrive back in the city. Many of them hear strange and ominous noises, like a baby crying out late at night, but they're unable to figure out where it all stems from. Eventually the hear of a coin operated locker that will grant wishes if they put a coin in and hope for the best. Well, most of them go for it and give it a shot only to find out that, gasp, the coin locker is possessed by an evil spirit and now it's after them for reasons that never really matter much. Some of them end up dead, the rest of them have to get the spirit to stop messing around and screwing stuff up.

Made with little attention to plot and with the story really only existing to string together a few very tired and derivative set pieces in which the ghost manifests in ways that are so blatantly ripped off from other works as to be laughable, The Locker isn't really anything to write home about. Yeah, it's made well in that the cinematography is nice if unremarkable and the performances aren't horrible but the fact that the ending of Ring is copied to the point where all you'd have to do to make it the same scene is replace Sadako's well with the locker in this film makes it pretty hard to take seriously and in the end if feels like nothing more than a quick cash in on the current trend of Japanese ghost films that appear as cranky young girls with long black hair and piercing eyes. The fact that the ghost in the film moves in almost exactly the same way and exhibits many of the same mannerisms as the beastie in Ju-On – The Grudge doesn't do it any more favors. I understand that the films are all pulling from the same basic mythology but trying something different within the confines of that mythology might have been a novel idea.

The Locker II: Evidently the first film proved to be successful enough to inspire director Kei Horie to get behind the camera a year later for a follow up film, which falls for many of the same genre trappings that the first movie wallowed in, but it doesn't take them to quite the same ridiculous extreme.

This one picks up directly where the first film left off. The movie begins with a young man rolling around on the ground, screaming in terror at something that he has seen. Cut to a nearby hospital where a man dies and it's obvious that something foul is in the air in Japan tonight. The curse of the spirit from the first movie, dubbed Sachiko in this film (she didn't have a name in the first film) is alive and obviously doing just fine as she's out for more evil vengeance by way of her haunted coin locker.

If it sounds like more of the same, it is. More Ju-On swipes, more Ring swipes. However, I will give credit where credit is due in that the second film is considerably better than the first one. The jump scares are timed better and come at you from a far less obvious angle than they did in the first entry, and some of the set pieces are a little unsettling this time out instead of just copied from other films, although a painfully obvious rip off from Hideo Nakata's Dark Water hurts things a bit.

This is good news and bad news at the same time. It's good because we've got a reasonably entertaining little ghost story here, but it's bad because it works directly from the continuity established in the first film and unless you suffer through that one prior to checking out this superior sequel, you're going to be left very much in the dark – it's a catch 22. Regardless, even if it again isn't a very original film it's definitely of higher quality and while not exactly a memorable entry in the seemingly endless catalogue of Japanese ghost stories to come out in the last ten years, it's a fun one.

Video:

Both films come to DVD in 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfers, quality being pretty much identical for both movies. Both of these movies were V-cinema releases and as such, were likely pretty low budget so you can expect some limitations of what the filmmakers had to work with to shine through in the transfer but overall, both of these movies look quite good on DVD. The black levels do exhibit some mpeg compression artifacts here and there and there is some mild edge enhancement but neither of those problems are over bearing, neither is the line shimmering that you'll probably notice in a few scenes. The colors look pretty decent with skin tones looking very natural and while the films are a little on the flat side, this is common in Japanese cinema and seems to be a stylistic choice rather than a transfer flaw and to be honest, it suits the tone of the films just fine and hardly hampers the viewing experience.